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It Is Necessary To Remember, As We Think Critically About Domination, That We All Have The Capacity To Act In Ways That Oppress, Dominate, Wound (whether Or Not That Power Is Institutionalized). It Is Necessary To Remember That It Is First The Potential Oppressor Within That We Must Resist – The Potential Victim Within That We Must Rescue – Otherwise We Cannot Hope For An End To Domination, For Liberation.

-Bell Hooks

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It Is Necessary To

Bell Hooks

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It Is Necessary To Remember, As We Think Critically About Domination, That We All Have The Capacity To Act In Ways That Oppress, Dominate, Wound (whether Or Not That Power Is Institutionalized). It Is Necessary To Remember That It Is First The Potential Oppressor Within That We Must Resist – The Potential Victim Within That We Must Rescue – Otherwise We Cannot Hope For An End To Domination, For Liberation.

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Western Culture

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Telling The Truth

The Word "love" Is Most Often Defined As A Noun, Yet Al The More Astute Theorists Of Love Acknowledge That We Would All Love Better If We Used It As A Verb.

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To Teach In A Manner That Respects And Cares For The Souls Of Our Students Is Essential If We Are To Provide The Necessary Conditions Where Learning Can Most Deeply And Intimately Begin.

Women Have Endeavored To Guide Men To Love Because Patriarchal Thinking Has Sanctioned This Work Even As It Has Undermined It By Teaching Men To Refuse Guidance...a Useful Gift All Love's Practitioners Can Give Is The Offering Of Forgiveness. It Not Only Allows Us To Move Away From Blame, From Seeing Others As The Cause Of Our Sustained Lovelessness, But It Enables Us To Experience Agency, To Know We Can Be Responsible For Giving And Finding Love.

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Democratic Socialism

I Think The Women's Movement Has Had A Major Impact On Everybody's Lives In Our Nation And In The World As A Whole.

..critically Intervene In A Way That Challenges And Changes.

Whether We Learn How To Love Ourselves And Others Will Depend On The Presence Of A Loving Environment. Self-love Cannot Flourish In Isolation.

The Wounded Heart Learns Self-love By First Overcoming Low Self-esteem.

The Fierce Willingness To Repudiate Domination In A Holistic Manner Is The Starting Point For Progressive Cultural Revolution.

People With Healthy Self-esteem Do Not Need To Create Pretend Identities.

Changing How We See Images Is Clearly One Way To Change The World.

Changing The World

One Difference With The Political Writings, Whether About Feminism Or Class, Is That The Intent Is To Change How People Think Of A Certain Political Reality; Whereas With Cultural Criticism, The Goal Is To Illuminate Something That Is Already There.

I Feel Sad That We Have Allowed These Knee-jerk Feminists Who Want To Act Like It's A Struggle Against Men...but Again That's The Least Politically Developed Strand Of Feminism.

Our Hearts Connect With Lots Of Folks In A Lifetime But Most Of Us Will Go To Our Graves With No Experience Of True Love.

You Have To Trust That If You Are Calling My Name In A Way That Is Offensive To Me, I'm Going To Share It With You. But You Also Have To Know What Your Feelings Are Behind Calling Me "bell."

Knowing Love Or The Hope Of Knowing Love Is The Anchor That Keeps Us From Falling Into That Sea Of Despair.

Contrary To What We May Have Been Taught To Think, Unnecessary And Unchosen Suffering Wounds Us But Need Not Scar Us For Life. It Does Mark Us. What We Allow The Mark Of Our Suffering To Become Is In Our Own Hands.

I Guess I Wish We Could Talk About: What Does It Mean To Have A Politics Of Intersectionality That Also Privileges What Form Of Domination Is Most Oppressing Us At A Given Moment In Time.

Most Gay Men Are As Sexist In Their Thinking As Are Heterosexuals. Their Patriarchal Thinking Leads Them To Construct Paradigms Of Desirable Sexual Behaviour That Is Similar To That Of Patriarchal Straight Men.

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...move From Emphasis On Personal Lifestyle Issues Toward Creating Political Paradigms And Radical Models Of Social Change That Emphasize Collective As Well As Individual Change.

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I Get So Tired Of People Acting Like, You Know, Black Men And Women Never Help Each Other, Never Support Each Other.

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Yesterday I Was Thinking About The Whole Idea Of Genius And Creative People, And The Notion That If You Create Some Magical Art, Somehow That Exempts You From Having To Pay Attention To The Small Things.

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It's Really Important To Have Life Strategies And Part Of That Is Sort Of Knowing Where You Want To Go So You Can Have A Map That Helps You To Get There. And The Traditional Way Tells Us Oh We Get Into School And Someone Else Advises Us, Helps Us, But That Often Does Not Work For African Americans Female And Male. Because What Works For The Dominant Culture Often Does Not Work For Us.

African American

How Different Things Might Be If, Rather Than Saying "i Think I'm In Love," We Were Saying "i've Connected With Someone In A Way That Makes Me Think I'm On The Way To Knowing Love." Or If Instead Of Saying "i Am In Love" We Say "i Am Loving" Or "i Will Love." Our Patterns Around Romantic Love Are Unlikely To Change If We Do Not Change Our Language.

True Resistance Begins With People Confronting Pain... And Wanting To Do Something To Change It.

We Judge On The Basis Of What Somebody Looks Like, Skin Color, Whether We Think They're Beautiful Or Not. That Space On The Internet Allows You To Converse With Somebody With None Of Those Things Involved.

Death Is With You All The Time; You Get Deeper In It As You Move Towards It, But It's Not Unfamiliar To You. It's Always Been There, So What Becomes Unfamiliar To You When You Pass Away From The Moment Is Really Life.

Dare I Speak ,to Oppressed And Opressor In The Same Voice? Dare I Speak To You In A Language That Will Move Beyond The Boundaries Of Domination- A Language, That Will Not Bind You, Fence You In, Or Hold You? Language Is Also A Place Of Struggle. The Oppressed Struggle In Language To Recover Ourselves, To Reconcile, To Reunite, To Renew. Our Words Are Not Without Meaning, They Are An Action, A Resistance. Language Is Also A Place Of Struggle.

I Do Get A Little Pissed At People Who Write Me And Want Me To Do Things, And Spell My Name Wrong.

. . .there Is An Element Of Play That Is Almost Ritualistic In Black Folk Life. It Serves To Mediate The Tensions, Stress, And Pain Of Constant Exploitation And Oppression.

Readers Forget That One Can Critique Yet Still Admire.

Sadly, Children's Passion For Thinking Often Ends When They Encounter A World That Seeks To Educate Them For Conformity And Obedience Only.

Self-love Is The Foundation Of Our Loving Practice. Without It Our Other Efforts To Love Fail. Giving Ourselves Love We Provide Our Inner Being With The Opportunity To Have The Unconditional Love We May Have Always Longed To Receive From Someone Else.

If We Are Ever To Construct A Feminist Movement That Is Not Based On The Premise That Men And Women Are Always At War With One Another, Then We Must Be Willing To Acknowledge The Appropriateness Of Complex Critical Responses To Writing By Men Even If It Is Sexist. Clearly Women Can Learn From Writers Whose Work Is Sexist, Even Be Inspired By It, Because Sexism May Be Simply One Dimension Of That Work. Concurrently Fiercely Critiquing The Sexism Does Not Mean That One Does Not Value The Work.

Black Males Who Refuse Categorization Are Rare, For The Price Of Visibility In The Contemporary World Of White Supremacy Is That Black Identity Be Defined In Relation To The Stereotype Whether By Embodying It Or Seeking To Be Other Than It…negative Stereotypes About The Nature Of Black Masculinity Continue To Overdetermine The Identities Black Males Are Allowed To Fashion For Themselves.

All Too Often We Think Of Community In Terms Of Being With Folks Like Ourselves: The Same Class, Same Race, Same Ethnicity, Same Social Standing And The Like..i Think We Need To Be Wary: We Need To Work Against The Danger Of Evoking Something That We Don’t Challenge Ourselves To Actually Practice.

Once You Do Away With The Idea Of People As Fixed, Static Entities, Then You See That People Can Change, And There Is Hope.

I Am Passionate About Everything In My Life--first And Foremost, Passionate About Ideas. And That's A Dangerous Person To Be In This Society, Not Just Because I'm A Woman, But Because It's Such A Fundamentally Anti-intellectual, Anti-critical Thinking Society. --bell Hooks

I Celebrate Teaching That Enables Transgressions - A Movement Against And Beyond Boundaries. It Is That Movement Which Makes Education The Practice Of Freedom.

Dare To Look At The Intersectionalities.

Intersectionality

The Function Of Art Is To Do More Than Tell It Like It Is-it’s To Imagine What Is Possible.

The Notion That Black Folks Have Nothing To Learn From Scholarship That May Reflect Racial Or Racist Biases Is Dangerous. It Promotes Closed-mindedness And A Narrow Understanding Of Knowledge To Hold That "race" Is Such An Overwhelming Concept That It Negates The Validity Of Any Insights Contained In A Work That May Have Some Racist Or Sexist Aspects.

I'm So Disturbed When My Women Students Behave As Though They Can Only Read Women, Or Black Students Behave As Though They Can Only Read Blacks, Or White Students Behave As Though They Can Only Identify With A White Writer.

If We Want A Beloved Community, We Must Stand For Justice, Have Recognition For Difference Without Attaching Difference To Privilege.

Beloved Community

All My Life I Have Longed To Have A Loving Relationship That Would Last A Lifetime.

Loving Relationships

Feminism As A Theoretical Enterprise Is Approached Differently By Black Women Depending On Where We Are. There Are More Reformist Black Women Who Tend To Use The Phrase "black Feminism".

It's In The Act Of Having To Do Things That You Don't Want To That You Learn Something About Moving Past The Self. Past The Ego.

Choosing To Be Honest Is The First Step In The Process Of Love. There Is No Practitioner Of Love Who Deceives. Once The Choice Has Been Made To Be Honest, Then The Next Step On Love's Path Is Communication.

Most Of Us Did Not Learn When We Were Young That Our Capacity To Be Self-loving Would Be Shaped By The Work We Do And Whether That Work Enhances Our Well-being.

I Believe That This Nation Can Only Heal From The Wounds Of Racism If We All Begin To Love Blackness. And By That I Don't Mean That We Love Only That Which Is Best Within Us, But That We're Also Able To Love That Which Is Faltering, Which Is Wounded, Which Is Contradictory, Incomplete.

My Students Tell Me, We Don't Want To Love! We're Tired Of Being Loving! And I Say To Them, If You're Tired Of Being Loving, Then You Haven't Really Been Loving, Because When You Are Loving You Have More Strength.

. . . No Black Woman Can Become An Intellectual Without Decolonizing Her Mind.

Whether We're Talking About Race Or Gender Or Class, Popular Culture Is Where The Pedagogy Is, It's Where The Learning Is.

All The Work I Do Is Built On A Foundation Of Loving-kindness. Love Illuminates Matters.

My Grief Was A Heavy, Despairing Sadness Caused By Parting From A Companion Of Many Years But, More Important, It Was A Despair Rooted In The Fear That Love Did Not Exist, Could Not Be Found. And Even If It Were Lurking Somewhere, I Might Never Know It In My Lifetime. It Had Become Hard For Me To Continue To Believe In Love's Promise When Everywhere I Turned The Enchantment Of Power Of The Terror Of Fear Overshadowed The Will To Love.

Another Response To Racism Has Been The Establishment Of Unlearning Racism Workshops, Which Are Often Led By White Women. These Workshops Are Important, Yet They Tend To Focus Primarily On Cathartic Individual Psychological Personal Prejudice Without Stressing The Need For Corresponding Change In Political Commitment And Action. A Woman Who Attends An Unlearning Racism Workshop And Learns To Acknowledge That She Is Racist Is No Less A Threat Than One Who Does Not. Acknowledgment Of Racism Is Significant When It Leads To Transformation.

As All Advocates Of Feminist Politics Know Most People Do Not Understand Sexism Or If They Do They Think It Is Not A Problem. Masses Of People Think That Feminism Is Always And Only About Women Seeking To Be Equal To Men. And A Huge Majority Of These Folks Think Feminism Is Anti-male. Their Misunderstanding Of Feminist Politics Reflects The Reality That Most Folks Learn About Feminism From Patriarchal Mass Media.

Time And Time Again When I Talk To Individuals About Approaching Love With Will And Intentionality, I Hear The Fear Expressed That This Will Bring An End To Romance. This Is Simply Not So. Approaching Romantic Love From Foundation Of Care, Knowledge, And Respect Actually Intensifies Romance

Few People Who Are Hit Once By Someone They Love Respond In The Way They Might To A Singular Physical Assault By A Stranger.

I Think I Was Always Obsessed With Esthetics.

When Angels Speak Of Love They Tell Us It Is Only By Loving That We Enter An Earthly Paradise. They Tell Us Paradise Is Our Home And Love Our True Destiny.

[o]ne Of The Most Vital Ways We Sustain Ourselves Is By Building Communities Of Resistance, Places Where We Know We Are Not Alone.

We All May Have Prejudices, But We're Not All Part Of A System That Reinforces, Reinvents And Reaffirms Itself Every Day Of Our Lives, Systemically.

The World Would Be A Paradise Of Peace And Justice If Global Citizens Shared A Common Definition Of Love Which Would Guide Our Thoughts And Action.

I Would Also Say That, In Practice, Many More Americans Are Anarchists Than Would Ever Use That Term.

When I Write Provocative Social And Cultural Criticism That Causes Readers To Stretch Their Minds, To Think Beyond Set Paradigms, I Think Of That Work As Love In Action. While It May Challenge, Disturb And At Times Even Frighten Or Enrage Readers, Love Is Always The Place Where I Begin And End.

In An Ideal World We Would All Learn In Childhood To Love Ourselves. We Would Grow, Being Secure In Our Worth And Value, Spreading Love Wherever We Went, Letting Our Light Shine. If We Did Not Learn Self-love In Our Youth, There Is Still Hope. The Light Of Love Is Always In Us, No Matter How Cold The Flame. It Is Always Present, Waiting For The Spark To Ignite, Waiting For The Heart To Awaken And Call Us Back To The First Memory Of Being The Life Force Inside A Dark Place Waiting To Be Born - Waiting To See The Light.

One Of The Things I Find Most Exciting Is Talking With People Who Are Working With My Work. Who Are Using It In Some Way With Their Life To Address Everyday Politics Of Meaning.

To The Extent That We Live In A Postmodern World And It Shapes The Concrete Circumstances Of Our Daily Lives, I Would Say Postmodernism Affects My Work Or Influences My Work.

The Intellectual Tradition Of The West Is Very Individualistic. It's Not Community-based. The Intellectual Is Often Thought Of As A Person Who Is Alone And Cut Off From The World. So I Have Had To Practice Being Willing To Leave The Space Of My Study To Be In Community, To Work In Community, And To Be Changed By Community.

I Feel Like There Is Always Something Trying To Pull Us Back Into Sleep, That There Is This Sort Of Seductive Quality In All The Hedonistic Pleasures That Pull On Us.

Dominator Culture Has Tried To Keep Us All Afraid, To Make Us Choose Safety Instead Of Risk, Sameness Instead Of Diversity. Moving Through That Fear, Finding Out What Connects Us, Revelling In Our Differences; This Is The Process That Brings Us Closer, That Gives Us A World Of Shared Values, Of Meaningful Community.

A Central Tenet Of Modern Feminist Thought Has Been The Assertion That "all Women Are Oppressed." This Assertion Implies That Women Share A Common Lot, That Factors Like Class, Race, Religion, Sexual Preference, Etc. Do Not Create A Diversity Of Experience That Determines The Extent To Which Sexism Will Be An Oppressive Force In The Lives Of Individual Women.

To Be Truly Visionary We Have To Root Our Imagination In Our Concrete Reality While Simultaneously Imagining Possibilities Beyond That Reality.

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Douglas Hofstadter

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